About

The title of this blog comes from ergophobia the irrational fear of work. It’s tongue in cheek, I am of course, not actually afraid of work, but if modern tools and practices will save me a ton of it, I’ll be happy to take them on board.

I am a thirty-something year old, full stack developer working in the South West of Ireland. My main strength would probably be in PHP, while I have gained experience with many frameworks and libraries over the last 15 years, most of my work over the last few years has been done in Laravel. I have experience in testing, debugging, architecture and have created everything from bespoke e-commerce platforms to restful api’s and sass apps. I have been writing html & css for more than 20 years, and I am perfectly comfortable creating modern sites and utilising current tools and frameworks, such as sass and bootstrap.

While I have some skill in the area, my javascript would not be as strong as my back end skills. Over the last decade and a half I have gained a reasonable proficiency in both vanilla javascript and jQuery, and recently I have been using VueJS and modern build systems (grunt) in my projects. Currently, most of my learning is focused on this area and a large part of my reading time is spent with my nose in books like “Javascript, the good parts” and “Eloquent Javascript”. My plan over the next few months is to take a deeper delve into some of the other frameworks out there, such as React and Angular. I have dabbled with node a fair bit in personal projects, but nothing for release.

While it’s never anything I really set out to learn, and I just kind of picked things up on the way, in most companies I have worked for, I have been the one who has been responsible for tasks that, in a larger outfit, would fall into a DevOps role. I have experience in most facets of DevOps, CI, versioning, testing, monitoring etc. My typical dev stack involves git, vagrant, puppet and codeship.